THAT WHICH IS BEYOND NAMES

REPLY TO A THREAD AT INDIGOSOCIETY.COM, TO SOMEONE WHO REPORTED SEEING A TRANSDIMENSIONAL PORTHOLE WHILE ON THE PSYCHEDELIC 'SALVIA DIVINORUM' -

I am a little jealous - according to Erowid Salvia simply doesn't work on a certain proportion of people, they call us 'salvia hardheads', & I think I may be one of them.

I was brought up in a mystery school who believe that Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos archives are literally true, and these feature 'Stargates' similar to that which you describe.

Before I go any further please remember to treat all other-worldly ideas with a pinch of salt and a dose of humour - at least until our time has come, which we anticipate to be soon. Otherwise you are likely to become 'mentally unbalanced' - and in consequence you might also become what those contemporary three-brained beings of your favourite planet affectionately call 'sectioned'.

This is why I call myself The Jester - to encourage people to greet the unseen worlds with a lightness of heart and with laughter, as is appropriate.

Do you think the Hare Krishna are joking when they called one of their books 'Easy Journey to Other Planets?' Of course they are joking, and so am I. Am I joking? I AM. I AM always joking, for I AM The Jester - and THIS is The Cosmic Joke.

ET=ART (energy multiplied by time equals Being)

It is not uncommon to hear people refer to our planet as 'Spaceship Earth' - this is a metaphor in the sense that it is a set of words to describe something that is beyond names, it is literally true in the sense that The Earth flies through space and we ride upon it.

Further to this it has been suggested that Star Trek's 'Galactic Federation' might be an appropriate metaphor for 'that which is beyond names' by both the 'scientologists' (money grabbers) and those you call the 'Foundation For The Law of Time' - who, incidentally (like my mother's mystery school) incorrectly predicted 'the end of the world as we know it' (what they call 'The Reversal') in 2000.

It seems to me of note that I did not make this prevalent mistake when writing on this subject in fiction and in jest, twenty years ago in my teens. But having made this prediction without knowing about the Mayan prophesies and in an environment where the ending of time (see Krishnamurthi and Bohm's book of the same name for a sane and grounded investigation into what this means) was anticipated, but at a completely different time - it does make one wonder.

And - as my mother's mystery school were fond of saying - 'to wonder is to begin to understand'. I would add - 'to laugh is to begin to understand' - for it is only in the moment where a laugh occurs that we can truly entertain the friction of apparently contradictory ideas. It is a common trope in sci-fi that systems fail when fed contradictory facts, if we take ourSELVES too seriously, our robot heads end up pivotting like the girl in the exorcist, steam coming out of our created ears, our Steven Hawkings voice maniacally shrieking - DOES NOT COMPUTE DOES NOT COMPUTE.

HERMANN HESSE'S STEPPENWOLF

"We are in my Magic Theater," he said with a smile, "and if you wish at any time to learn the Tango or to be a general or to have a talk with Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I'm bound to say, Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you.

Another appropriate metaphor is that of trying to run two operating systems simultaneously, with all the potential system conflicts and crashes this can entail. I do not have the audacity to categorically state "I for One was right where so Many were wrong" - but I do think it is worth it to temporarily 'suspend disbelief', for when the download is complete it does appear to make hermetic sense. There is no point 'believing' anything - we have been doing this for thousands of years, and where has this got us? This is what I think, not what I believe. No-one can challenge the fact that this is what we are in the process of thinking, the process of contemplating - it is exciting, but it is not necessary to get over-excited about it. After the dialectic has reached tipping point I think it will be the norm that what I have begun to describe here will be part of what is considered the consensus view of reality; and that this will be corroborated by breakthroughs in the understanding and observation of how quantum particles relate to consciousness.

I am trying not to spoon-feed anyone my set of names and metaphors to describe 'that which is beyond names'. It easy to set up a religion, that is the old way, it is harder to 'remember yourself' [Gurdjieff]. I am not religious in your sense of the word - that is to say that I am for religious tolerance but against didactic religion - Mankind does not have to cast off its sacred words and ceremonies, for they unite men and celebrate existence, but rather to simply recognise that the sets of names they use point to the same thing, something that ultimately defies naming.

Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these dominates man's thinking, relationships and his daily life. These are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship." Krishnamurthi

Instead I would rather draw people's attention to the manner in which I perceive those who best describe 'that which is beyond names' to agree on everything all the time, and to possess a uniting philosophy that includes all branches of human knowledge; whereas those who base their conclusions as to the nature of Being on Positivist insight alone cannot even agree upon whether they exist or not half of the time. It is in this spirit that I would like you to consider these quotations regarding the nature of 'that which is beyond names' -

THE OPENING VERSES OF THE TAO TE CHING:

The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.

The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.

By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.

The beginning of all understanding.

WALT WHITMAN, FROM 'SONG OF MYSELF'

I do not know it--it is without name--it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death--it is form, union, plan--it is eternal
life--it is Happiness.
The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

HERMANN HESSE'S STEPPENWOLF

Now, Harry, come along, be as jolly as you can. To make it so and to teach you to laugh is the whole aim in getting up this entertainment--I hope you will make it easy for me. You feel quite well, I trust? Not afraid? That's good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with unfeigned pleasure, enter our visionary world. You will introduce yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide, since this is the custom."

He took out the pocket mirror again and held it in front of my face. Again I was confronted by the same indistinct and cloudy reflection, with the wolf's shape encircling it and coursing through it. I knew it too well and disliked it too sincerely for its destruction to cause me any sorrow.

"You will now erase this superfluous reflection, my dear friend. That is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet it, if your mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school of humor. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously."

I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the wolf were going through their convulsions. For a moment there was a convulsion deep within me too, a faint but painful one like remembrance, or like homesickness, or like remorse. Then the slight oppression gave way to a new feeling like that a man feels when a tooth has been extracted with cocaine, a sense of relief and of letting out a deep breath, and of wonder, at the same time, that it has not hurt in the least. And this feeling was accompanied by a buoyant exhilaration and a desire to laugh so irresistible that I was compelled to give way to it.

The mournful image in the glass gave a final convulsion and vanished. The glass itself turned gray and charred and opaque, as though it had been burned. With a laugh Pablo threw the thing away and it went rolling down the endless corridor and disappeared.

"Well laughed, Harry," cried Pablo. "You will learn to laugh like the immortals yet. You have done with the Steppenwolf at last. It's no good with a razor. Take care that he stays dead. You'll be able to leave the farce of reality behind you directly. At our next meeting we'll drink to brotherhood, dear fellow. I never liked you better than I do today. And if you still think it worth your while we can philosophize together and argue and talk about music and Mozart and Gluck and Plato and Goethe to your heart's content. You will understand now why it was so impossible before. I wish you good riddance of the Steppenwolf for today at any rate. For naturally, your suicide is not a final one. We are in a magic theater; a world of pictures, not realities. See that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that you really are not in love with your highly questionable personality any longer. Should you still, however, have a hankering after it, you need only have another look in the mirror that I will now show you. But you know the old proverb: 'A mirror in the hand is worth two on the wall.' Ha! ha!" (Again that laugh, beautiful and frightful!) "And now there only remains one little ceremony and quite a jolly one. You have now to cast aside the spectacles of your personality. So come here and look in a proper looking glass. It will give you some fun."

Laughingly with a few droll caresses he turned me about so that I faced the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself.

I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked unusually good-humored, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely had time to recognize myself before the reflection fell to pieces. A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or bits of him, each of which I saw only for the instant of recognition. Some of these multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy and comic, well-dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long haired, and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash, recognized and gone. They sprang from each other in all directions, left and right and into the recesses of the mirror and clean out of it. One, an elegant young fellow, leaped laughing into Pablo's arms and embraced him and they went off together. And one who particularly pleased me, a good looking and charming boy of sixteen or seventeen years, sprang like lightning into the corridor and began reading the notices on the doors. I went after him and found him in front of a door on which was inscribed:

ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS

ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT

My point is that Gurdjieff says "everything is matter", while Kahlil Gibran says "everything is spirit". They do not disagree - there is only one substance vibrating at different frequencies, the word you use is just a metaphor, a finger pointing at a star. Thus - if you are looking for good and bad aliens you will see aliens, if you are looking for angels and demons you will see angels and demons. If you stop looking for angels, demons and aliens? You will see your SELF in The Mirror-like White Light, The Timeless State of One from which The Many forms emerge.

You have plenty to think about, I hope some of these words resonated with you and I haven't been too didactic. I will leave you with the words of a great artist, my friend Niall Richardson:

"I wish I could write more, but time is short...

I for one believe that insanity (in the strictest sense) is something that is unavoidable if one is to be an artist, pure and simple. But the flip side to that is - as in all nature, there is an inverse to everything - the same thing could be ........as absolute sanity.

must go now.

x"